


Lifeforce: A Star Trek Discovery Horror Story

by Komodo13



Category: Lifeforce (1985), Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Lesbian Character of Color, Lesbian Vampires, Lesbians in Space, Lifeforce - Freeform, Sexual Tension, Space Vampires, Star Trek References, USS Discovery (Star Trek), Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2020-10-29
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:33:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 8,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27263542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Komodo13/pseuds/Komodo13
Summary: Starfleet Security Investigator Ellen Landry is sent to a remote Federation colony to look into the sudden appearance of a ghost ship, a seemingly-abandoned Starfleet vessel. Landry soon finds that the ship has brought back beings beyond comprehension who seek to visit terror and desire on an unsuspecting world.
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

_It glided through space effortlessly as it had for millennia, a great, grey-black needle tucked away in the obscuring debris-cloud of the tail of comet. To human eyes, it would seem to have no course, no direction, but that would be incorrect. Like the comet, it’s journey through the cosmos was leisurely, patient, and methodical. The passage of time meant little to its builders and occupants, for they measured such things on a vastly different scale than humans did. In the centuries spent travelling between worlds, they slept, reaching out with their minds, and seeking the ones that would guide them to their traditional feeding grounds._

_But this portion of the galaxy had changed since the comet had last rumbled though. It was more populated and trafficked, and the spaces between worlds no longer as empty as they once had been. It was in one such expanse, that a small, disk-shaped craft, its hull bearing the numbers NCC-1422 and the name_ USS Yamanaka _dropped out of warp and angled in on a course to intercept the great ship. It bounced on the edge of the comet’s tail, scanning the massive vessel and transmitting friendship messages on all channels. When no replay came, it resumed course for its rendezvous…_

*********

**Space Station K-85**

“This one?” Linnea’s fingers traced a line along Ellen Landry’s bicep. Her arm was folded with her hand behind her head, and Linnea lay on her side next to her.

“Drunk miners on Janus Four,” Landry said, meeting Linnea’s questioning gaze, noticing that her eyes were the same shade of green as her skin. “When miners blow off steam, they get drunk. When they get drunk, they get violent, and when they get violent, they go at each other with broken bottles. We broke up fights all the time on that colony in the days after the Federation stood it up, and someone always finished the night cut. Finally, we’d just stun everybody from the doorway and save ourselves the trouble.”

“They deserve it for hurting you,” Linnea pouted breathily, then kissed the white scar gently. It was part performance, Landry knew, but she put a solid effort into hiding the seam between the genuine and the affectated. They both knew this was a relationship of convenience, and Landry appreciated the effort.

Linnea’s fingers played across her collarbone, tickling, raising gooseflesh. “And this one?” she asked, smiling slyly, noticing the effect of her touch on Landry’s naked body.

“Shuttle went down on an asteroid in the Kellis System. Took the rescue ships almost a full solar day to recover us.”

Linnea kissed that scar too, and Landy turned her head so she could press her face against the softness of Linnea’s auburn hair and inhale its sharp, exotic scent, the pheromones making her body respond. Like so many Orions, Linnea was pure sensuality made flesh, and Landry’s attraction to her was unabashedly and almost exclusively sexual. She wasn’t proud of that fact, but she wouldn’t pretend otherwise.

“So, you went down…” Linnea lowered her head, kissing Landry between her breasts, then her stomach. Landry squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled sharply as she felt Linnea’s tongue probe the puckered scar just below the right half of her ribcage. “And this one?” Linnea’s eyes were regarding her again from along the expanse of her body.

Landry stared at the wall, looking back in time at the memory. She heard the thunderous blast of the slug-thrower and felt the searing pain as the chunk of metal tore through her body. “I don’t talk about that one,” she said softly.

“Really? Well, however can I going to change your mind…” Linnea pondered, trailing kisses along Landry’s quivering midriff. The scar was a nice reminder about the perils of trust, the sting of betrayal made physical. It had become a part of who she was. Linnea wasn’t the lover that was going to get the story out of her, but if would be fun for her to try. Landry buried her hands in the heavy blanket of Linnea’s hair, guiding her head.

Her communicator chirped angrily.

“Damn it,” Landry sighed and rolled over, her hand groping along the bedside table.

“Mmmm…let it go,” Linnea breathed.

“I can’t,” Landry sighed. “The only channel I left open is the emergency channel.” She retrieved the communicator and flipped it open.

_“Landry, get your stuff together. We need you at Wilco Colony ASAP.”_

Landry gave the communicator a puzzled look that Commander Childs, on the other side of the transmission all the way at Starbase 4—Starfleet Security’s closest satellite office for the Special Investigations Division—might not be able to see but could probably intuit. “Wilco? That’s a…a food production colony, right? The hell’s so important there? Did the cows stage a coup?” __

 _The_ "USS Yamanaka _just warped into the sector and took up orbit over the planet,”_ Child said crisply. _“This is a D-Notice situation, so that’s all I can tell you over unsecure subspace. Get to Wilco, Landry. Fast.”_ The communicator buzzed as the line went dead. Landry tossed it aside with a flick of her wrist.

K-33 wasn’t precisely exile, but it was close enough. SID had its investigators peppered throughout the quadrant at various jumping-off points, and this was one of the furthest-flung. There wasn’t much around that demanded Starfleet Security’s attention—certainly nothing on Wilco Colony. Whatever was going on, it was something Starfleet didn’t have a playbook for.

“Does this mean I should stop?” Linnea asked, resting her chin on Landry’s abdomen.

Landry met her gaze. “No,” she said, replacing her hands on the back of Linnea’s head. “Just be fast.”


	2. The Falling Night

**Wilco Colony Operations Center**

**Planet: Tobe VI**

Night was falling on Wilco by the time Landry arrived. The little _Gilmore_ -class courier had made a looping pass over the colony, giving her an expansive view of the world still in the midst of terraforming. It was beautiful in its own way, she supposed, with hundreds of kilometers of farmland stretching out in great spokes from a modest urban center. Endless rows of crops teemed with automated tenders and harvesters, mindlessly, ceaselessly doing the work necessary to help feed the spreading Federation. Beyond the massive plots of farmland, ringing the colony and creating a border between the terraformed land and the still-poisonous wasteland were kilometers of coniferous forest, dutifully exhaling the oxygen that sustained the inhabitants of Wilco.

The Operations Center was 73-story tower in the center of the urban hub, and at the top was an enormous command center that looked to be staffed by close to fifty or so people, all doing the work necessary to keep the colony running smoothy. The Chief Administrator’s office, just off of it, was an oasis of calm by contrast. The orange light of sunset flooded through the windows, bathing the elegant, but understated room in a warm, autumnal glow, and deepening the honey-blonde highlights of Doctor Christine May, the colony’s Primary Administrator.

“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said, slightly breathlessly. “As you can imagine the last few hours have been…well, _busy_ doesn’t quite capture it. Maybe _surreal_ is a better word? However you choose to describe it, it’s more than we can take on here.” May pinched the bridge of her nose. She had strong Nordic features—right down to the upturned ski-jump of a nose—and she was probably beautiful under other circumstances, but at this moment, her ice-blue eyes were red-rimmed and bleary, and portion of her honey-colored hair had escaped its practical braid and made commas around her cheeks.

“One riot, one Ranger,” Landry shrugged. “The _Yamanaka,_ what’s happened?”

May shook her head. “Hopefully, you can find out for us. She dropped out of warp last night—about eighteen hours ago—without any warning or communications with the colony. It’s systems appeared to be automated.”

“A ghost ship?” Landry raised an eyebrow. She’d reviewed the data on the _USS Yamanaka_ on the trip over. She was a pocket-sized _Magee-_ class research vessel with a crew of 83 and assigned to outer edge of the quadrant with no reason to be visiting or even passing near Wilco. Her skipper was an intense-looking woman named Gloria Paredes, who hailed from Luzan, Earth. According to her personnel file Captain Paredes was 34 and driven--a fiercely intelligent Science officer who’d served with distinction on a half-dozen vessels before receiving her own commission. There was no record of erratic or insubordinate behavior.

“For all intents and purposes, yes,” Doctor May nodded. “We didn’t find any lifesigns when we scanned the ship, What we did find…well, the readings were like nothing any of our scientists have seen before. Granted, Lieutenant, we’re an agricultural colony, so our people don’t have a heavy background in xeno-biology, but we’ve all dabbled some—you can’t work at a colony and not have a basic familiarity with examining alien lifeforms. But what we found…what was on _Yamanaka_ …” Doctor May visibly shuddered and looked out the bank of windows. The deepening shadows carved dark lines and angles into her face. She inhaled sharply through her nose, then looked back to Landry.

“It’s…easier to show you.”


	3. The Creatures and the Dead

Doctor May led Landry to a large holding room several floors below her office. Despite the building’s architectural style—it was the standard Federation pre-fab colony design—the interior was surprisingly warm and inviting, with furniture and accents that look to have been modeled after Earth décor from the previous century or so. Landry didn’t know much about interior design, but she recalled seeing it in movies. It made the specimen-holding room even more stark by contrast.

In the center of the room, hanging in a zero-G field, was something torn from a nightmare.

The first thing Landry saw were the wings. Massive, leathery wings, fully unfurled, hung from spindly arms that ended in claw-like hands. They didn’t belong on anything living, anything with language or intelligence or culture, but rather on an ancient depiction of some unholy beast, some herald of evil and damnation. The body was lean and sinewy, covered in a membranous hide that only barely concealed spidery veins and arteries and fibrous muscle. The great, bifurcated head held small mean eyes above a huge, snakelike mouth filled with sharp, fang-like teeth.

Landry felt the flesh on her arms raise and grow cold as a wave of pure, primal fear—the kind she hadn’t felt since she was a child—rolled through her body. “What the hell is that thing?” she gasped.

“Whatever it is—was—it was in stasis in one of _Yamanaka’s_ research labs. There are a couple more there, too. Fourteen, to be precise.” Doctor May crossed her arms as if against a sudden chill.

“Is it alive?” Landry felt her gun hand twitched toward the laser pistol in the cross-draw holster at her hip.

“There aren’t any life readings,” Doctor May said. “That said, it’s not showing the level of desiccation or deterioration we’d expect in something dead for a pronounced period of time.”

Landry didn’t find that terribly reassuring. She toyed with the idea of putting an energy bolt through the thing’s evil skull just as a precaution, then shook the idea away. She was a professional, goddamn it, not some frightened colonist with an itchy trigger-finger. “Did _Yamanaka_ pick these things up?”

“We assume so, given their presence in the labs under standard quarantine protocols. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to access the ship’s logs remotely, so all we can do is speculate.”

Landry suddenly thought of the question she hadn’t asked. “You haven’t sent anyone to the _Yamanaka_ yet?”

Doctor May nodded gravely. “We had stood up a medical team, but then our scans picked up these…things. We beamed them out, but our transporters aren’t as precise as Starfleet models—we don’t do the kinds of things you do, the kinds of missions and that sort of thing…”

“Doctor, what are you getting at?”

“We…we picked up some of the crew from the research lab when we beamed out the creatures.”

Landry shrugged, not comprehending. “So? What did they say?”

Doctor May regarded her with an expression on the edge of collapse. “They didn’t tell us anything. They couldn’t. It’s why we couldn’t send anyone to that ship.”

Now Landry’s whole body went cold. “What did you beam back?”

********

The four bodies laid out on parallel slabs in the morgue were desiccated husks, grey and withered, and sick-looking. They had once been human. They had once been crewmen aboard the _Yamanaka_ , though now their blue Starfleet uniforms were baggy and bilious over their shrunken frames. Their hair was brittle and abrasive-looking, more like wire than anything else. From her vantage in the observation area, Landry couldn’t even tell their gender.

“What happened?” she asked May.

“We don’t know. We’ve been waiting to turn them over to Starfleet for examination.” Landry threw her a look. “We don’t have any xeno-pathologists here and didn’t want to disturb the bodies or destroy evidence,” Doctor May shook her head and let out a small sigh. “We just have too many questions and no answers, Lieutenant.”

Landry turned away from the viewport and the shriveled bodies. “The answers,” she said, “are on that ship.”


	4. The Ship of Damned

Landry felt the slight tingle of the transporter effect fall away even though the environment suit, and the bridge of the _Yamanaka_ took shape and definition and finally reality around her. Her breath hissed inside her helmet as she took in her surroundings.

The bridge was dim, but not dark, and the consoles alight with readouts and functioning systems. There was no one to read them. There was no one anywhere on the bridge. Landry holstered her laser and scanned the atmosphere with her tricorder. It would feed the results to her suit’s display. In her peripheral vision, she caught the shimmer of Warrener and King—two of Wilco’s security deputies—transport onto the bridge beside her. They were big bruisers, but not much good in a tactical situation, Landry could tell. Warrener held a phase-pistol levelled at his hip where it was impossible to aim or bring to bear quickly.

“Holster up,” she told him. “There’s no one here.”

“Jesus, that’s a relief,” King breathed. At least he was honest.

Landry’s suit pinged and the display readout inside her visor. ENVIRONMENT: CLEAR. “Scan’s done. We’re good,” she said, latching the tricorder to the suit’s belt, then deactivating the helmet. It retracted into itself and then into the collar of her suit. She took a breath. The air tasted like every other starship she’d ever been on: recirculated, sterile, and slightly metallic.

“Not a chance,” Warrener griped. “Not after what happened to those people from the research lab. I don’t want to look like that.”

“Whatever did that, it’s not a pathogen,” Landry said as she rounded the bridge consoles.

“Where is everyone?” King asked as his helmet deactivated. He had a wide, expressive face that was utterly without guile.

“I hope that’s a rhetorical question, and not something you actually expect me to answer,” Landry said as she looked over the bridge consoles.

“I just…you know…I mean…”

“Can it,” Landry said brusquely as she settled behind the Ops console and scrolled through the ship’s readouts.

“We’re sitting ducks here,” Warrener snapped.

“There’s no one here to be a threat,” Landry said, reviewing the readouts. “The crew’s gone. This is a ghost ship.” She felt her hackles rise.

“What about those… _bat-things?_ ” King asked.

“In stasis, I think,” Landry did another internal scan of this ship, but the results were the same. “At least something is in stasis on Deck Four. Looks like that’s the only living thing on the ship.” She stepped away from the Ops console. “Let’s avoid that for now. According to this, main transporters are offline. Either of you have any experience with transporter systems?” She looked back and forth between the two.

“I ran transporters on a merchant ship for three years,” Warrener said. “I could take a look at them. I mean, I can’t do repairs…”

“They don’t appear to be damaged, just offline. See if you can get them up. If we need to get out of here in a hurry, I don’t want to have to cram into a lifeboat.”

“You want me to go there alone?” Warrener blanched. Landry fought back a sigh.

“King go with him. I’m going to try and get into the ship’s logs. Contact me if you find anything.”

They left unenthusiastically, and Landry sat down at the comms station. She keyed the internal communication system. “Hey, stay in touch with me,” she broadcast.

_“Yes, ma’am,”_ King replied obediently. Landry nodded in satisfaction and went back to the system.

The system was security locked, so Landry tried a series of master codes. Starfleet Security had a couple dozen such codes, so the process took a few minutes, but eventually the console gave her a command tree of ship’s logs.

“All right,” she muttered. “Where do we begin?”


	5. A Tale of Terror (I)

**Captains Log, Stardate 3125.8**

**A Federation sensor beacon has detected an unknown object of massive size. It appears to be moving under its own power at sublight speeds, however it has somehow evaded detection by any Federation ships or outposts along its trajectory. I’m diverting the _Yamanaka_ from its previous course to investigate….**

**Captains Log, Stardate 3125.9**

**We’ve taken up a parallel course with the object. It’s immense. Sensors put it at nearly two-hundred and fifty kilometers at length. Scans are unable to penetrate the object, but it appears to be under the control of some type of intelligence. So far, it has shown no sign that it is aware of our presence. All hails go unanswered. Since our transporters are unable to penetrate the hull, I’ve ordered an exploration team to try and board the craft…**

**Captains Log, Supplemental:**

**_…immense…the interior…mostly empty space…there’s no internal layout as we understand it. No decks or quarters…my god, are those…_ Yamanaka, _I think we’ve located the crew, or the residents…like nothing we’ve encountered before…the tricorder doesn’t recognize them as any known race in the Federation’s databases…Stand by…what are those? How could…_ Yamakana, _prepare a research lab. We’re bring back specimens, and…we’ve discovered human bodies…they seem still alive, I think…have medical teams standing by…_**

**Captains Log, Stardate 3126.4**

**We are maintaining course and speed with the craft until we can get long-range communications up and can inform Starfleet of this discovery. While we have made no further expeditions to the ship, the crew remains on edge. Commander Collins is deeply critical of my decision to bring back specimens of the ship’s crew as well as the men and the woman we found in stasis there. He has made it clear that he will be filing his official protest with Starfleet as soon as we re-establish communications.**

**Captains Log, Stardate 3126.6**

**The systems failures have spread throughout _Yamanaka_. I am forced to confront the fact that the overwhelming evidence points to a member of the crew as a saboteur. If this is the case, it should be a relatively easy matter of identifying the guilty party. More troubling are the mysterious cases of fatigue that are crippling my crew. Doctor T’Lok has been unable to ascertain the cause of the affliction, and internal sensors and bio filters have detected no alien contaminants. I am hopeful we can get long-rage communications online in short order, and can broadcast a distress call…**

**Captains Personal Log, Stardate 3126.9**

**I have to offload the crew. The surviving crew. They will drain them all, I know it. Their needs are so…prodigious…I have to take care of the crew now, while I still have the will to do so. While I still care.**

**Captains Personal Log, Stardate 3127.2**

**They don’t understand. They couldn’t possibly understand. They’ve never felt a love like this, a love so intense that it’s like standing naked before a star. The kind of love that will make you do anything, anything at all...**

There had been more log entries at some point, but they’d been scrubbed, and Landry didn’t have access to the equipment necessary to recover them. “Goddamn it,” she swore quietly at the inexpressive screen before her. “You were supposed to make this whole situation make more sense, not less. Now what the hell does any of _this_ mean?” Frustration was bubbling up in her. Every step she took just seemed to throw more mysterious in her path and it had stopped being fun hours ago. She seriously considered blasting the comms station just let off some steam. She rested her hand on the grip of her laser gun.

 _“Lieutenant?”_ King’s slightly breathless voice came over her suit’s speaker.

“Go for Landry.”

_“We got the transporters functional, and, uh, they’re beaming someone over.”_

“What? Who?”

 _“I don’t…It looks like…”_ His voice was replaced by Warrener’s gruff bark.

_“The thing was pre-set to activate once it became operational. Coordinates are about twenty meters off the port bow.”_

Close enough to be within their shields, Landry thought. “I’ll be right down there.”

_“They’re not beaming in here, Lieutenant.”_

“What? Where—” She broke off as a brilliant column of light appeared in the center of the bridge, then coalesced into a human form. A moment later, a compact Asian woman stood before her, eyes darting about the bridge, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

“Captain Paredes,” Landry said. “Welcome back.”

The woman’s endless, dark eyes locked on her like a firing solution. “We’ve got to get out of here,” she panted. “Before they find us!”


	6. The Beginning of the Horror

They ran through dim, sporadically lit corridors, Landry only occasionally noticing the damage, the shattered instrument panels, the scorch marks. A corner of her brain thought _man, someone really did sabotage this ship…_

“We didn’t know what we were bringing aboard!” Paredes said breathlessly. “By the time we found out what they were--what they were doing—it was too late.”

“The bat-people?” Landry asked as they skidded to a halt outside the transporter room. Paredes gave her a perplexed look. “Whatever you call them,” Landry said.

“No,” Paredes said. “They were dormant. It was the humanoids we found that was the real danger.”

“Humanoids? What--” Landry’s question was cut off as the door slid open. Inside the dimly-lit room the main transporter console glowing like an altar. Warrener and King were indistinct silhouettes beside it.

“Who’s this?” Warrener demanded, taking a step toward them.

“Captain Gloria Paredes. Are you the ones that beamed me over?” Paredes asked as she headed to the console.

“I, uh, yeah,” Warrener blustered.

“Good. You got it working. Now we need to destroy it.” She began to work the controls.

 _“What?”_ Landry and Warrener said in unison.

“We could set one of our phase pistols to overload,” King suggested.

“We just got the thing working!” Warrener said peevishly.

Paredes ignored him and looked over at Landry. “Is there a planet below us?”

“That’s where we came from.”

“Damn. That makes this exponentially worse,” Paredes shook her head.

“Why?” Landry asked, joining Paredes by the console. “You still haven’t told us what’s going on here.”

Before she could get an answer, the doors exploded inward in a spray of plasticine shards. Landry fell into a defensive crouch, reaching for her gun, anticipating the concussion. It didn’t come. There was no blast, no heat, no force at all. It was as if a great, invisible fist had simply punched through the door. Behind her, she heard Paredes gasp in terror. _“It’s them!”_

But the figures that stepped implacably through the jagged, gaping hole in the doorway were not the bat-like things she’d seen in stasis on Wilco. Nor were they any other sort of beast, demon, or monster plucked from her nightmares.

They were _beautiful._

Two men and a woman. All nude, their bodies perfect as if some omnipotent entity had created an avatar of the ideal human form for each gender and set them loose upon the Universe. Their limbs were long and roped with muscle, their abdomens flat and taut, their skin as smooth and perfect and membrane of cell. The woman stood before the two men, the apex of a triangle of pure physical perfection. Her flesh was a perfectly-even alabaster, which made the deep, glossy black of her thick, flowing hair even more pronounced and seemed to highlight the small, clean wedge of pubic hair. 

Landry wanted to fire, but between the intention and the action the circuit was blown by a rush of pure, consuming desire. It wasn’t the simple biochemical reaction to pheromones—her nights with Linnea had left her well-versed in the flavor of those sexual urges—but something incalculably more potent powerful.

The woman’s raven-maned head swiveled to face Landry, and the gaze of her rich, hazel eyes beneath arched brows seemed to pierced her, to _violate_ her more deeply and intimately than any man ever had. Landry didn’t just want the woman carnally; she wanted to be as naked as the mystery woman. She wanted to tear off her constricting uniform for the woman, to _kneel_ before her, to worship her womanhood and perfection, to commune with her mentally, sexually, spiritually…

 _“Use my body.”_ The woman said, her voice seeming to reverberate inside Landry’s mind.

 _“Shoot her!”_ Paredes’s voice snapped through Landry’s brain like a whip being cracked. She aimed in…

...too late. Warrener stepped in her way, his body all but totally blocking her shot at the woman. She inhaled to scream at him to move when the room began to strobe with pulsing, blue energy. She watched as Warrener leaned in, as if for a kiss, and was abruptly tethered to the woman by a crackling, arcing ribbon of energy, as violent as any raking phaser blast. Warrener’s body shuddered spasmodically, and in the blue/white glow of energy she saw his face collapse in on itself as if the skull supporting it had suddenly turned to taffy. His skin grew grey and oniony, and in mere moments he looked like one of the crewmen she’d seen down on Wilco.

The two men surrounded King, who looked back and forth between them, overwhelmed. Landry fired, her beam cutting deeply into the chest of the blonde-haired man. If the man/god felt the pain or the effect on his body he didn’t show it.

“We have to go!” Paredes shouted. Landry ignored and fired again, at the other one this time. Her beam blew through his abdomen, but he gave no more acknowledgement than the other.

The woman/god thing was done with Warrener and let go of him. His body hit the ground, the environment suit just a sack of bones now. Landry recoiled at the woman’s sudden attention, terrified of what it might make her do.

 _“Let’s go!”_ Paredes screamed. Landry spun and saw the captain standing at the rear entrance to the transporter room. Landry ran for it, and Paredes pivoted through the doorway ahead of her. Behind them the room throbbed and flared and screamed.


	7. Flee

They fled down a short access corridor—say this about the pocket-sized _Magee-_ class boats, Landry thought, it was a short distance between any two places—and into a turbolift. When the doors slammed shut, and the car dropped through the skeleton of ship, Landry turned to Paredes. The woman’s caramel complexion had gone grey and pallid with anxiety.

“What the hell were those things?” she demanded.

“They killed my crew,” Paredes huffed and slumped against the wall of the ‘lift, pressing one hand to her forehead. “Oh, God forgive me, but I couldn’t save them.”

“What did they do to them?” Landry asked. “King and Warrener? Did they kill them?”

Eyes still pressed shut, Paredes shook her head. “Not…precisely. Not yet. But they will be soon. They can’t stop it.”

Irritation was welling up in Landry again. “What the hell are they? Are they human? They look too…” she shook her head, a sense-memory of the limitless desire that had poured over her.

“Perfect?” Paredes offered ruefully. “Desirable? You felt it didn’t you? You’d do anything for them. The one you imprinted on.”

Landry didn’t want to answer that. “What are they?” she asked again, sharply this time. It was a shot across Paredes’s bow, warning her off of the subject of what Landry had felt.

“I don’t know,” Paredes sighed. “But I know what they’re capable of. They have a transporter and a planet beneath us—”

“Colony,” Landry corrected. “Wilco colony.”

“Wilco? Is that where we ended up?” Paredes rolled her eyes. “Four million space-farmers and no planetary defenses.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Landry nodded.

“Then we’ve got to get to a shuttle,” Paredes said, straightening up and throwing her shoulders back. “We’ve got to get down there and warn them.”

“Are there any left on this ship?”

Captain Paredes smiled slyly.


	8. A Tale of Terror (II)

The captain’s personal shuttlecraft was spacious and comfortable—almost more of a yacht than a shuttlecraft. It retained all of the capabilities of a long-range transport, but the seats and benches were designed more like the furnishings of a luxury resort than the spare, functionality of a Starfleet vessel. “Captain’s prerogative,” Paredes explained. “My family’s in the furniture business, and I had one of my cousins redesign the interior of this shuttle. Now it’s the Captain’s Personal Transport.”

“Very nice,” Landry said, looking over the simulated wood console. It seemed like a colossal waste of time to her. In the viewport, Tobe VI loomed, and Wilco Colony was a growing green patch on its barren surface. “Now, why don’t you explain to me precisely what’s going on, so I know what we’re telling the Colonial Authority.”

Captain Paredes sighed and turned her seat to face Landry. “Did you review the logs?” she asked.

“Some,” Landry answered. “I got interrupted.”

“Then you know we encountered some kind of ship. Something never seen before in the Federation’s collective memory.”

Landry nodded. “I heard that part. It got patchy after that.”

“We went aboard. I took an exploration team. The _Yamanaka_ is a research vessel, so I didn’t have any shortage of xeno-biologists to accompany me. The ship’s interior was…it unlike anything I’ve ever seen before—unlike anything _any_ of us have seen before. It was this bizarre fusion of organic and stylized designs that were just…one moment we were floating through a corridor constructed with living tissue, with muscles and mucus, and…and then we’d be in a room that looked like a modernistic cathedral. All glass, and stone, and metal…but huge. The size of a stadium. It was…” she shook her head at the memory.

“Two members of the team had to take a moment. They were overwhelmed, mentally overwhelmed. It can happen, you know. The brain just becomes overloaded trying to make sense of nonsensical, contradictory things. That’s what that place was like…but then we found _them_.”

“The bat-people?”

Paredes gave Landry a hard look. “Would you stop calling them that, please? It’s not very scientific.”

Landry put up her hands placatingly. “Sorry. Continue.”

Paredes narrowed her eyes but went on. “The inhabitants of that ship—I don’t know if they were the crew or not—were all dead and totally desiccated like mummies or any corpses exposed to space for centuries. Our working theory was that the ship was under some type of autonomous control, and that the inhabitants had simply died off hundreds of years ago and the ship had kept going. We set up pattern enhancers and _Yamanaka_ beamed several of the things back.

“We wanted to explore the ship further, find its bridge if it had one. Or its engine room. Crew quarters. The design was so… _alien_ …I think we just wanted to find something familiar. Anything we could recognize.”

“But you didn’t?”

“The problem was the size,” Paredes shook her head. “Two-hundred and forty kilometers long…without sensors, that’s like mapping out an entire city on foot. It would take months at best.

“The ship was showing some unusual power readings, so we decided we should withdraw for safety reasons and return if there was no indications of danger—maybe bring some mapping equipment next time—but Lieutenant Carroll, one of our xeno-biolosists, picked up something on his tricorder. Life signs. _Human life signs._

“We found them in one of those cathedral-like rooms. It was immense and filled with these great, black hexagonal crystals, like…coffins _._ There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands, a sea of them and building toward a central mass. At the top of it were three transparent crystal coffins. And there they were, naked, perfect, serene, as if in the most peaceful sleep you can imagine.

“I ordered the party to remove the crystal coffins and take them with us to the shuttle. I didn’t want to use the transporter. I can’t explain why, I just didn’t trust them. I wanted those people in my sight the whole time, like they were the most valuable things in the universe to me.

“When we got back to the ship, the real troubles started. Carroll, Nakagawa, and Wheelis—all people on the exploration team—came down with some type of fatigue. Doctor T’Lok couldn’t come up with any diagnosis that explained it. No illness or radiation poisoning or anything the like. They just seemed to grow weaker by the hour.

“We found Wheelis first. He didn’t report to his duty station, so we forced the door of his quarters. The thing we found in his bunk barely seemed human.”

“The dried-out corpses,” Landry said as much to herself as Paredes.

“Mummified,” Paredes nodded. “You saw them, I take it?”

“On Wilco. In the research station. They beamed them down with the bat…with the creatures from the ship. It was the medical staff, apparently.”

Captain Paredes nodded gravely. “They went later. After the sabotage started.

“It started with the internal sensors. That was easy enough to dismiss—a systems malfunction isn’t unheard of when you start logging some serious exploration time. It’s aggravating, but not suspicious. Then the comms went down. It was some kind of a specialized computer virus that made a mess of all of our communications programs. Lieutenant Burkel, my comms officer, theorized we had onboarded it during some contact with a non-Federation craft…”

“But you didn’t buy it?”

Paredes shook her head. “Not when it took out the engines shortly after I reported we’d be breaking contact with the alien craft.”

“Was there anyone you suspected?” Landry asked. “I mean, I’ve never even heard of sabotage on a Starfleet vessel, so I have to assume whoever did it was exceedingly unhappy.”

“That’s why we were so slow to suspect it. Not until some of the crew began to develop an _obsessive_ interest in the humans we recovered from the ship…

“We had them in sickbay. They appeared to be in some form of stasis, so Doctor T’Lok was reluctant to wake them. The nurse, Lieutenant Chien, refused to leave them. She stayed with those coffins for _hours_ after her shift. Doctor T’Lok had to order her back to her quarters to rest.”

“In an investigation we’d call that a _clue_ …”

“By the time her behavior became alarming she’d let them go,” Captain Paredes’s expression became cloudy. “She set them free. That’s when everything went to hell.

“Whatever they are, they’re not human. They feed on human energy, the…the _lifeforce_ of living things. That’s what had killed Carroll, Nakagawa, and Wheelis. They were drained slowly, though. Sustaining the things while they were in hibernation. Once they were awake…well, you saw how that ends, didn’t you?”

“They did that to your crew?” Landry asked.

“Most of them, I think,” Paredes squeezed her eyes shut, battling back the memory. “Once it started, it happened so quickly…They devoured the crew like…like sharks in a school of fish.”

“Didn’t you fight back?” Landry asked, trying to keep the skepticism out of her voice.

Paredes’s eyes flashed. “It’s not the easy. You felt it, didn’t you? The power they have over your mind? They control your thoughts and your desires. In the end, my crew went to them willingly. Doctor T’Lok was the only one of the crew that could discipline her thoughts well enough to counter their mind-control powers. I relied on her to organize the evacuation of the ship.

“It was clear the aliens didn’t want control over the _Yamanaka_ , they just wanted to feed. I thought that we could just get off the ship in lifeboats and stay within the ship’s shields, we might be able to regroup and retake the ship. But by the time I tried to implement my plan…it was too late. It was just too late…” She cradled her head in her hands, pressed the heels into her eyes, then took a shaking breath and finished.

“Doctor T’Lok must have sacrificed herself to save me. But by the time I ejected, there was no one left to join me.”

“How’d you end up in orbit of Wilco?” Landry asked.

“I’m not sure,” Paredes shook her head. “If I had to guess I’d say the automated navigation came on when there were no command from the helm for forty-eight hours. It plotted a course for the nearest inhabited outpost, which just happened to be Wilco. My little lifeboat was inside the shields, so I got taken along for the ride.”

“All right,” Landry said, turning back to the rapidly-growing planet in the viewport. “What do we do?”

“We need to speak to someone in charge of the colony. Do they have a chieftain or something?”

Landry gave an ironic cock of her head. “I know just who to speak to.”


	9. Evil Comes Home

The exterior lights of the Operations Center still penetrated the darkness, but there were fewer lighted windows than Landry would have expected, and the sight of the scattered few—looking like remaining teeth in a mouth full of ruined bridgework—gave her an uneasy tingle at the back of her neck. It was a feeling she’d long ago learned to trust.

“Something tells me there should be more activity,” she said as she brought the shuttle down on the rooftop landing pad.

“I’m pretty sure there is,” Paredes said tightly. “It’s the type of activity that we need to be worried about.”

By the time they got to Doctor May’s office, the tingle was edging toward genuine alarm. It was barely allayed by May’s casual demeanor.

“Captain Paredes, it’s so good to see you. I can’t tell you how concerned we were when we couldn’t find anyone aboard the _Yamanaka_. Obviously, we feared the worst.” She smiled plastically, and perspiration glittered along her hairline.

“It was the worst,” Paredes said bluntly. “And it’s going to happen here too unless we can get to a subspace transmitter. Do you have anything like that?”

“Well, of course we have communications…”

“Not sector-wide,” Paredes shook her head. “We need something that can punch a beam through space to the nearest starbase. Something long-range. A beacon.”

Doctor’s May blinked rapidly, the smile becoming more and more strained. “I…we don’t have anything like that. But we do have a deep-space sensor array for planetary safety. I suppose they could be repurposed into a subspace beacon.”

“We need to get there.”

“It’s right on the northern edge of the colony,” Doctor May said like a hostess offering up deviled eggs. A drop of sweat rolled down her cheek, and she wicked it away with the back of her hand.

“Are you feeling all right?” Landry asked.

“Yes, of course. I feel _amazing!”_ Her smile widened into something manic.

“Landry,” Paredes said, cautioning.

“You’ve no idea what’s happened since you left!” Doctor May’s smile became inhuman—far wider than natural. Her face began to pulsate, the flesh seeming to want to break free of her skull and crawl away.

_“Landry!”_

But she was already drawing the laser pistol and thumbing the intensity tab in one smooth movement. “Get back!” she shouted and pressed the firing stud. The beam was an intense scarlet, and Doctor May’s body was devoured by it, her shriek echoing in the room even after she’d vanished into a haze.

“Good thinking,” Captain Paredes said in the sudden silence.

“Yeah, but I can only do it another six or seven times before the power pack is dead,” Landry griped. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“We need to find the subspace beacon.”

“We know where it is: the north border, we can take the shuttle, and—”

An explosion rumbled in the distance, and the sky outside through the windows flared orange. Landry and Paredes both stared out over the colony where fires were flaring into existence.

“Oh, this is bad…” Landry said and rushed through the doorway to the command center. The massive control room was a vision of chaos: alarms screamed, monitors flared with explosions all over the color, and the corpses…

_…the corpses were alive!_

Dozens of them; grey, withered things with immense, yellow eyes, and straw-like hair scrambled over consoles and chairs, clawing at one another with spindly, bone-like fingers, while lips parted in rictus grins as they moaned inhuman sounds…

The room throbbed with brilliant blue light as the things set upon the command staff, clawing and grasping and gripping, draining their living essence in vivid blue tethers of energy. One of the things—it used to be a woman—lifted its bulbous head on its spindly neck and fixed Landry with sickly, sallow eyes. Sandpaper lips cracked and peeled away from brown, splintered teeth, as its mouth opened impossibly wide. It pointed at Landry and Paredes with a withered claw and lowed like a barnyard animal. The rest of the corpses swung their skull-like heads at them and responded with the same excited utterances.

They scrambled like sharks to blood.

Landry shouted in alarm and slapped blindly the door’s manual controls. It slid shut with an aggravating casualness. She blasted the locking mechanism with a low-power bolt.

“We need to get out of here,” Landry backed away from the door as if it was on fire. “Why don’t we just go back to the ship?”

Paredes was already sliding Doctor May’s desk in front of the door. “Two people can’t run a starship, Landry. We need assistance, and with comms fried, we’d just be coming back down here to that beacon anyway.” Landry threw her a look of pure frustration as she grabbed the other end and wedged it into the doorframe.

“Well, we need a new command center to coordinate the evacuation and rescue efforts, because we’re sure as hell not doing it from here.”

“Landry, we if we don’t get word out to Starfleet there’s not going to be any rescue or evac. _Yamanaka_ can’t beam out that many people hat quickly, even with a standard crew working her systems.”

Abruptly, the door began to buckle in the frame as a relentless pounding began from the other side. Landry scowled. “We don’t have time to argue, let’s get to the shuttle.”

The turbolifts were out of commission, so they had to take the emergency stairs. In the stairwell, on dozens of floors below them, the sounds of inhuman moaning, screams, and the blue arcs of damned souls filled the stairwell.


	10. A Horrific Communion

The shuttle tore through a veil of smoke as it soared over a society seemingly tearing itself apart. Below them, she could see tiny blue flashes dotting the streets and buildings becoming curling comets of energy that zipped through the air.

“We’re too late, aren’t we?” Landry asked. “At the rate this colony is devouring itself, help won’t get here in time.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Paredes said. “If there’s a starship nearby—a formidable one like the _Yeager_ , she’s a _Cardenas_ -class ship. I think she’s in the area. They might be able to contain or reverse this.”

“Color me skeptical,” Landry said as she brought the shuttle in to land on the array’s vehicle pad. The array itself was a cluster of four massive deep-space sensors that pointed to the night skies like four enormous, silos.

“We need to get to the control room!” Paredes shouted and ran for the turbolift. Landry barely caught up and wondered if the woman would leave her behind. She suspected that she would.

The turbolift deposited them in an enormous, high-ceilinged room dominated by a multi-sided console in the center. The ceiling was transparent, Landry noted, and she guessed would display whatever the sensors were fixed upon. An entire quadrant could be displayed in this room, she thought, with the control room staff in the center.

“I think this is the master control module,” Captain Paredes said as she hurried over to one illuminated panel. Landry shot it out from over Paredes’s shoulder. It melted in a cascade of sparks, causing the Starfleet captain to leap back a step.

“I don’t know what that does, but I’m pretty certain it’s not contacting the _Yeager,”_ Landry said, keeping her gun trained on Paredes.

Captain Paredes opened her mouth to say something, then just asked. “What do you know?” 

“The logs don’t match the story you gave me. You tried to erase the ones that flat-out contradicted your version of events, but you weren’t thorough enough. There was still plenty of evidence that didn’t add up. The better question is why try and destroy the logs at all? And that answer’s simple: you set them free. Not Lieutenant Chien. You did.”

Paredes’s expression was like a building collapsing. “Yes.”

“And once you got those things back from the ship they started to devour your crew. _Yamanaka_ ’s compliment is less than a hundred people. A ship that size would need a lot more life energy, so you brought them here. To the closest inhabited world.”

“I know there’s nothing I can say that will make you understand, but you felt it back on _Yamanaka_ when I had to drag you out of the transporter room. If I hadn’t wouldn’t you have stayed?”

Landry said nothing, just concentrated on keeping the gun level as the memory of that alien desire flashed through her.

“It’s more than desire, Landry. It’s love and terror on a scale that’s unimaginable. She’s in my mind and my soul, and I think she has been since before we even discovered the ship. There’s some connection between us from when I opened her coffin and gave her some of my life essence. I hear her in mind. I _hear_ her! And I can feel her touch…Landry, it’s all I can do to keep my mind together and function as a Starfleet officer.”

“You think you’re still a Starfleet officer? After what you’ve done?”

“Landry, please!” Paredes pleaded. “You need to get out a warning beacon. The ship is almost here. We can’t stop it, but you can warn the others!”

Abruptly the air in the room seemed the electrify and crackle around them. Blue streaks of energy swirled around them like poltergeists from ancient folklore. “Oh god, they’re here!” Paredes screamed in despair. Then the fabric of reality seemed to tear open like the flap of a tent, and in a blaze of blue/white light, the three humanoids appeared near the center of the room.

Paredes screamed. Landry thumbed the gun’s intensity tab to maximum and fired. The laser’s blinding beam lanced out and struck one of the naked men squarely in his perfectly sculpted chest. The man glowed intensely as the gun’s energy surrounded and engulfed his body…and then fell away like water.

“They’re not human, Landry!” Paredes shouted. Landry felt her heart hammer as panic threatened to overtake her. She fired again—a headshot this time—but got no more effect.

_“It will be much less terrifying if you just come to us,”_ one of the males said in a similar, reverberating voice as the female, only deeper and more resonant. The gun grew heavy in her trembling hand and threatened to fall from her fingers. She suddenly felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the realization that surrender was the best option now. Her obligations as a Starfleet officer—her oath of service and her own personal code as a security officer—they all felt leaden and exhausting.

She took a step toward them.

“No!” Paredes shouted. “Landry, go! Get out of here!” Then she turned to the naked triad in the center of the room. The woman extended her arms.

_“Paredes…”_ her voice, ringing in Landry’s mind was like an invocation. The Starfleet captain stepped into the nude woman’s open arms and kissed her passionately. Energy swirled and crackled around them as they embraced, and Paredes tore her clothes away, never breaking from the perfect woman. Soon, she was naked too, her carmel flesh a contrasting gloriously with the woman’s ivory. Soon the two women joined in a column of power that tore through the domed ceiling and reached into the inky darkness of the nighttime sky.

Landry ran for the shuttle.


	11. The Vast Empty

Landry took the shuttle into orbit and gasped at what she saw. The great ship in orbit around Wilco looked like some the appendage from some mutated reptile. One great bulbous end had opened like an obscene flower, and now hung umbrella-like over the colony, receiving the massive column of energy that emanated from the planet’s surface. The life essence of the colonists, she assumed.

She hung in space a while, trying to think of something she could do, but this was all well beyond her control. At last, the bat-like ship finished its’ feeding cycle when an glowing orb--even more intense than the energy which surrounded it—floated up from the surface and into the ship. Landry didn’t know why, but somehow, she knew it was Paredes, locked in an eternal embrace with something she loved and feared beyond all human understanding.

The great ship folded onto itself and veered off toward deep space. Landry set the shuttle’s nav system for Starbase 4 and went to warp. It would be a long journey, and she would make it alone. She was thankful for that.


End file.
